In the Passion narrative to be proclaimed next Holy Week, the story of Peter’s three denials of Jesus will appear. Immediately after the crowing of the cock, the evangelist records a shocking and definitive event:
“Then the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Peter (…) went out and wept bitterly” (Lk 22, 61 ff).
That look of Jesus was not a lost look. It was intentional, deliberate. It was not by chance that Luke says that Jesus “turned and looked at Peter“. That gaze pierced Peter from one side to the other and transformed him. To better understand this valuable news from Luke, a scene that captures the dramatic sense of that look may help:
Imagine two prisoners in a concentration camp. One of them is you, who tried to escape, knowing that this was punishable by death. In front of you, they accuse your companion in your place,… and he remains silent; he is tortured in your presence… and he remains silent! When, finally, he is being taken to the place of execution, he turns for a moment and looks at you in silence, without a shadow of reproach. When you return home, will you be able to be your old self? Will you be able to forget that look?
How many times have you heard or spoken yourself of the Passion of Christ, and have you been moved by the sight of Jesus suffering in the Praetorium? The passion of Christ will remain alien to us as long as we do not enter into it through that narrow door of “for us“: Christ died for you and for me… for all.
Because the trap consists in unconsciously considering the passion as an event that took place more than two thousand years ago and is finished forever. How could we be moved and weep for something that happened so long ago? Suffering only acts on us as a presence, not as a memory. To understand the passion of Christ, we can only contemplate it as contemporaries. Christ is in agony until the end of the world. Scripture acknowledges that those who sin “crucify the Son of God afresh and deliver him up to ignominy” (Heb 6:6).
All this is not pious considerations. It is the plain truth, even if we do not know how to explain it. Have you allowed yourself to be looked upon by the One whom your own sins and betrayals have pierced? At some point in life, Christ’s gaze should meet ours and shock us to death, like an electric shock, making us let go of our miseries and vanities. A true conversion never happens without a crisis. In order to start a second life, the previous one has to end. And it only happens when between these two lives – the new and the old – there is a death, which puts an end to what precedes and begins the next. Let yourself be caught in Christ’s piercing gaze.
Juan Carlos cmf
(PHOTO: Misioneras Clarisas Monterrey)
